Tearing Down Statues, Reconstructing Memory The Historical Discourse Surrounding the Conquest of the Americas Five Centuries Later

Abstract

Since the 16th century, the work of the Spanish in the Discovery, conquest and colonization of America was questioned by those countries that, unable to defeat the Spanish armies, misrepresented, or lied, about that great labor. Centuries later, it was the pro-independence American people and currently the numerous American populist movements that have assumed this discourse, inciting the masses to demolish the statues and commemorative monuments and to rewrite the historical discourse. This phenomenon is fostered by the contingencies and vicissitudes of a Spanish national policy that hurts the work of our ancestors beyond the seas.